Some Musings on Loyalty

I've been thinking a lot about loyalty lately and feeling like a real dinosaur. Apparently "loyalty" is one of those things like "appropriate dress" and "etiquette" that have just gone completely out of style.

Wait! Let me hasten to clarify, lest you think I'm hinting about my personal life: I am not talking about any personal issues with loyalty, as with The EGE. Nope:  he is even more loyal than I am. If he likes you, you're golden. If they arrest me for, saying, robbing a major financial institution and shooting herds of innocent bystanders, and if they had caught all of this on video, The Ever-Gorgeous Earl would watch the video and say, "That's not my wife." If, on the video, I pulled off my mask and said, "It is I, Ricë Freeman-Zachery!," he would say, "That's an impostor." If I then pulled up my hooded sweatshirt and showed all my tattoos and pulled my dental records out of my camouflage backpack and offered a close-up shot of my teeth, he would say, "A very good impostor, granted, but an impostor, nontheless."

That's loyalty. And it is as rare as hen's teeth.

Short aside: one of the few memories in the vast desert of the Memory Part of my brain is of an exhibit we saw over a quarter century ago (I love saying that! so much more dramatic than "25 years ago") in a museum in, I think, Corpus Christi. It was a pokey little museum with some dusty exhibits, and next to a rattle from a rattlesnake and some kind of fossil was a neatly printed card that said, "Hen's Teeth." And there was a space in front of the card. And there was nothing there. Nothing. Not even dust. I cannot tell you how happy this made me. I have a photograph of it somewhere.

Loyalty is like that:  there's the card marking where it should be, but there's nothing there. There is no there there. No corporate loyalty, no fraternal loyalty, no marital loyalty. I can understand, in a way. If you've been screwed by your boss and your family and you friends and your partner, you maybe don't want to be on the being-screwed end ever again, and you maybe think the way to avoid this is to be on the doing-the-screwing end next time, if screwing has to be done.

Hence the climate of looking-out-for-number-one, loyalty-only-to-myself, Nobody Matters But Me, Me, ME that is just so, so sad.

Now, I understand that job loyalty is almost impossible in the 21st century. You've worked for the same company for years, and then one day you find out they've gambled your pension away, or the CEO has decimated the fund and fled to the Caribbean, where he's started a new country and declared himself Ruler for Life, not unlike Baby Doc. Or your job is outsourced and you find yourself working double shifts at McDonald's at a time in your life when you hoped to be exploring the US by RV.

I get that. You have to look out for yourself, and corporate loyalty seems to be an outdated and useless notion.

Loyalty is difficult. You're loyal to people who may leave you, steal your rent money, talk about you behind your back, sleep with your sister (why does Diego Rivera always pop into my head when I think about loyalty and the lack there-of?), and what does it get you? You're loyal to employers who may say, "Gee, you're doing a great job with that project, but we're going to let Bob take it from here because, well, you know, we like him better than we like you, plus he has better hair." Been there, oh, yeah--I've been there on that one. If someone more popular and famous or more photogenic or charming wants to do what you're doing? Step out of the way.

This all makes my head hurt. I understand why people look out for themselves first and feel loyalty only to their closest friends and immediate family, but I don't understand it, either. I don't understand going through your whole life always looking for the next rung up, always looking for a better opportunity, a more beneficial connection, a more enticing opportunity no matter what it takes to get there.

This may be one of the reasons I've never had the kind of financial success that almost anyone in our country would think was normal by this stage in life. I could have done better in many ways, and it would have helped if I'd looked for that next rung up, that better opportunity, that more glowing offer. I've been loyal in many situations where there was no reciprocation, where I would have been much better off if I'd said yes to other offers.

Do I regret this? No, I do not. Sure, it would be grand to make more money, to have positioned myself to be more in demand, to be able to wrangle better deals. But here's the deal: it's just like my diet, by which I mean not "the program I'm on to lose weight/lower my cholesterol/control my insulin" but rather "the foods I eat." People always say, when we talk of food and of the very few foods I eat, "You'll make a really healthy corpse." Meaning:  "we're all going to die anyway, and just because you eat healthily doesn't mean you're not going to die, so why not eat whatever you want?"

I always tell them, "It's not about being healthy at some point down the road; it's about how I feel every morning when I wake up."

And that's how it is with loyalty:  it's how I feel every day when I wake up. I have to live with myself and the things I do and the way I treat people and relationships and responsibilities. Sure, I could scramble and connive and claw my way up, wrangling better deals and more--well, more whatever:  money, security, fame, power, whatever.

You want personal examples? OK--I'll dig back in the past in order to make sure no one thinks I'm talking about them. I used to teach workshops in a whole bunch of areas, back when workshops were new and there weren't a bazillion teachers out there vying for classroom space. Once I taught a friend to do something she'd been wanting to learn, and then a month or so later contacted a store owner  where I'd taught before to propose a class in this technique. Why, no, she already had that workshop lined up. Hadn't I heard my friend was teaching that technique? My friend with whom I visited regularly on the phone and who, gee, hadn't mentioned anything about this? Or the time I got permission from a company owner to teach a technique with her product and offered it at a local stamp store. The store owner sat in on the workshop (free of charge, of course), and used my materials to create the project. Then, later, when I called her to set up another class, she said, Oh, well, she was going to teach it herself, now that she knew how to do it, because then she could keep the class fee and not have to pay me.

At least she was honest about that part of it--that woman had some cojones, for sure! But what beat it all is that when I pointed out that I'd gotten permission to teach the technique, she called the company owner and said that I was claiming I had "an exclusive""--that I was the only one who could teach it. The next time I called the company owner, she wouldn't talk to me.

Or how about the time I walked down an aisle at the quilt show in Houston and found kits containing everything you'd need to make a milagro pin doll, something I'd designed and had been selling and teaching around the country?

So, yeah, I know whereof I speak. Oh, yeah. I could give tons more examples, as could you--but these are just from far enough in the past that they're safe to use. I never did anything about any of them because I didn't want to play that way. I don't want to play with those kinds of people because their rules for the game are different from mine.

The thing is: I have to live with myself. We all have to live with ourselves. When everything else is gone--our family and our friends and our jobs and our community--we're left with just ourselves, and we have to be able to sit with ourselves and not be filled with regret or shame or self-loathing, that little nagging sense that we're not quite the person we'd like to be. If we're doing things that we know aren't right, we know it, even when we try to tamp it down or rationalize it away--"Everyone does it; it's standard operating procedure; it's the only way to protect myself from becoming a bag lady living in the alley and dumpster-diving for table scraps."

In the end, that's what I care about. Because I live with someone who is loyal and kind and compassionate and gentle, someone who will make extra work for himself to make someone else's life easier, I have an external barometer against which I can measure my choices: What Would The EGE Do? I have often used this--and I know other people who use it, too--to weigh my choices.

An example I've given before, but one that's telling in so, so many ways: many, many years ago, when The EGE was a young coach with dreams of someday being a head football coach on the high school level, he was at a jr. high where they were interviewing for an athletic director--the head coach who would be in charge of the athletic program for that school. He was offered an interview, and it was a job that would have helped move him up the ladder to his goal. But there were other coaches who wanted that job, too, and two of them were the female coaches who had been there longer and who had taken The EGE under their wings and helped him in his first years as a brand-new teacher and coach. They had many more years in than he did, and they wanted to move up, too. So he didn't interview. And when these women told him that they were having trouble with the process, that--this was back around 1980--the administrators were questioning whether a woman could be an effective athletic director and were asking these women to diagram football plays as part of the interview process, something that the male coaches were not asked to do, well. What did he do? Did he see an opportunity to bypass the female coaches, take advantage of the sexism rampant in the process and further his own career? He could have--the people in charge let him know he was in a position to move up: they wanted to give him the job. Instead, he worked with the women in their charge of discrimination, coming home and going through his pay stubs and making copies for them to use to bolster their argument that they had been paid less for the same work because they were women.

It would be nice to say that all of this was rewarded, but if you believe that, you're more of an optimist than I am. In the end, neither The EGE nor the female coaches got the job. They found another male coach and brought him in. Of course they did. The EGE never had his own high school football team, in large part because he wasn't part of the good ol' boy network, the ones who knew the rules and played by them, no matter what the cost to their values.

What The EGE got, instead, was the ability to look at his actions and know he did the right thing. He was loyal to the people he'd worked with and who had helped him, and he did what he knew was the right thing to do. A good career move? Not so much. A good way to live your life? Always. He can wake up every morning and know that he's treated people the way his daddy taught him, and he doesn't have a life filled with regrets.*

Which is why I need that bracelet: What Would The EGE Do? I wish everyone had one of those.

Alas, they do not. Other people out in the wide, wide world do not live their lives the way my husband lives his. I accept that, but it still surprises me, even though I know it shouldn't. I remember the first time I interviewed someone, someone Famous, and wrote the piece and sent it in and then, just before it was published, another magazine came out with a piece on this Famous Person, and it had a bunch of the same material and the same quotes: this Famous Person had said the same things to both of us. And I had to quick-like-a-rabbit go back through my notes and try to find other information and quotes--tough when The Famous Person has stock stories and anecdotes and explanations that get trotted out over and over and over--and try to make it sound fresh and not as if I'd read the article in the other magazine and copied it.

No, I don't think The Famous Person should have turned down the other interview. I'm not that naive, no. But I do think they should have mentioned it or, at the very least, made some sort of effort to give different interviews to competing publications. Of course not. Their goal was to get themselves out there, front and center, as often as possible, never mind how that worked out for anyone else, never mind extra work or inconvenience or embarrassment. Looking out for number one.

Some call it "working the system." You figure out how to get a leg up, whether it's playing one end against the other or finding a loophole in the contract or funneling information from one source to another, all in the hope of making yourself invaluable and irreplaceable. You offer the same project to two publications, hoping it will appear in both and double your exposure before either sees it somewhere else. You get wind of something and share the information even though it's not yours to share.

Some people are fine with this. They never give it a second thought--no guilt, no niggling suspicion that maybe it's not the right thing to do. Others of us, though, have an internal barometer, something that sends a little warning. If you aren't sure, if you feel you should ask Person A if it's OK if you do the same project with Person B, if you wonder if it's entirely proper for you to share the information/project/quotes/text/Top Secret Corporate Recipe with someone else, well. Something in there is asking you about how you want to live your life.

What to do? Go back up there and read my story about The EGE and the coaching job. If you're shaking your head and going, "Geez, what a fool! What a missed opportunity," then you just go ahead and do whatever you want to do. If, on the other hand, you read it and think, "I'd love to wake up every day and feel good about myself," there's your answer.

What about it: Do you think loyalty is dead? An old-fashioned notion that's obsolete in today's world? Or a way to live your life without the added complication of always having to wonder if this choice or that one is really, really the right thing to do?

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*Note: I read this to my husband and then tell him, "This is why you can't ever run away into the sunset with a 22-year-old Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader:  we'd both look like idiots on the internet and I'd have to shut down the blog and move into the Witness Protection Program."